WWW and the acceleration of hardware obsolescence
Bluetooth was broken for me on OpenSUSE for a day or two and I was
using my aging ThinkPad x200s for development.
The machine can play, running OpenBSD, 1080p video fine.
It's quite a demanding tasks if you think about it, on top it
can run game engines like FTE, of course - running Half-Life 2
era GL shaders and the like. It's a machine released in the late
2000s but does modern tasks quite well. It's more than enough for
word processing, it emulates games quite well.
Even virtualization is in fact very doable on this business laptop,
although you'd probably want to run Linux instead of OpenBSD for that
due to the lack of host-assisted x86 virtualization.
Anyway, the only task that was troublesome was browsing the web.
I didn't even dare try bloated sites like facebook...
just sites like archive.org, which haven't really changed and are
generally snappy, run like a snail on this machine using Firefox.
Using alternative browsers, it runs significantly faster (shoutout
to Dillo) but wow - it makes the machine look like an old 80s
machine trying to fill the screen with text in BASIC.
The thing is, archive.org hasn't changed, only the browser has.
If it wasn't for browsers becoming bigger, slower - with sites
generally becoming more demanding - most computers in use _outside_
of gaming would not become obsolete as quickly.
I am sure the same applies in the mobile space with phones, where
the only real innovations over the past decade have been focused on
delivering better camera sensors anyway.
We're producing so much waste by discarding machines that are so
perfectly fine for use in daily activities solely because the WWW
has created a demand for power hungry machines, wasting watts and
cycles to bring the same information to the screen that we've been
looking at a decade ago.
On YouTube you still watch pre-recorded videos and streams, with a
comment and reply system. That system is still the same, the actual
fundamentals have not changed - but under the hood it uses more
resources than ever. Animated thumbnails are now precached in various
sizes, same with regular thumbnails - the site is now importing mega-
bytes of external javascript libraries that add no visible function
to the overall user-experience.
On one hand, the artificial need of faster and faster hardware
designed for having to manage the thrown-together WWW will get us
fast hardware cheaper. The cost however is offset to the environment
with all the electronic waste we manufacture in the process.
Is a yearly phone upgrade all that necessary? It shouldn't be.
Perhaps not general purpose desktop PCs, but phones, contribute the
largest to this.
One solution would be to have, just like 'mobile' versions of web
pages, a slim/fast mode which does not do all the unnecessary abuse.
I bet you that if every web-browser had a check box in the 'burger'
menu called 'Fast', people would check it the moment they see it.
It's an idea anyway. To help find a solution to the massive waste we
all seem to create.
If you have an old computer, or an appliance like a tablet you don't
use. Gift it to somebody. On Android computers you can install
NewPipe to still enjoy services like YouTube without abusing
resources and having to deal with privacy intrusion.
Try to breathe new life into your machines with Linux, BSD or
Haiku like operating systems. Maybe convert an older 2000 laptop
into a DOS or older Win9x gaming machine if graphics drivers are
available. You'd be surprised at how much you can do with those
beasts. Don't just throw them away and don't impulsively buy the
newest and shiniest thing!
-- Marco